


Ipecac Tea

by girl-in-a-zorro-mask (rockhoochie)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Feminist Themes, Free Verse, Friendship, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:33:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26404282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rockhoochie/pseuds/girl-in-a-zorro-mask
Summary: Love letter to all of the women in my life.
Kudos: 2





	Ipecac Tea

**Author's Note:**

> Love letter to all of the women in my life.

Take my hand. Invite me in for ipecac tea - we'll sit together in this dark place, where dark thoughts fester, fizz and steep in the memories of all the different ways we've defiled ourselves.

We'll catalogue our squandered and carelessly scattered collections of shards and shattered pieces, compare and admire the stains on our skirts - the sepia-toned rainbows of blood and spit and sweat and infection. I'll show you how to braid the grease and flakes into the frayed and broken strands of your hair while you tell me stories of the storms that painted each lightning bolt stretch mark across the curve of your stomach. 

We can envy the deep shades of blue-violet beneath our eyes, trace our fingertips along dry, pale lips that cracked at the corners, test the depth of the stigmata crease that cuts across our foreheads. 

I'll show you my pain, you'll show me yours - the kind we try to hide but wear too well- stitched from the fabric of our tears and cuts, woven with strands of crack and copper and lampblacked glass, hemmed with wine and whiskey-laced-caked-on cum, expertly tailored to cling to the shapes of our psyches.

We'll brew and breathe in the stench of dank and desperate back-alley fucks, pores of bleach-soaked porcelain beneath soured air thick with bile and vomit, count every patch of piss-stained, shit-streaked, moth-eaten cotton. 

I can show you how to scrape your knuckles, rip your hangnails and lance the boil that pulses on the crease of your thigh. You can teach me how to tap into the current that feeds you with raw fight and refusal of flight, and how to wield a cardboard sword and protect your carefully spun spiderweb defenses. 

Together we'll traverse the entropic masterpieces of our minds, carve maps into our hearts as we learn to navigate the shadows. We'll master the art of sculpting catastrophe, lead ourselves into chaos while delivering each other from order, skip merrily around the barricades and hazard signs of our assigned false limits and their cleverly constructed perceived expectations, then slip through the bower of bramble that canopies the tight and tenderized pink flesh that's been stretched around every welcome invitation, tolerated intrusion, and savage violation. 

We'll find our way, by the flickering flames of ugly truths and the harsh glare of hindsight that lights our barren path, distant but twinkling, dim but steady - a beacon that beams far beyond trials and triumphs, or defeat and failure -and guided by the diamond-bright gift of a grain from the grit of your grace, that shows me what it means to be beautiful.


End file.
